WHY L^ATEX2_e?

The L^ATEX community has adapted the L^ATEX2_e standard. New typesetting tools, such as the latex2html script, the java applet IDVI, or PDF distiller, expect L^ATEX2_e. SEP needs these typesetting tools to publish on the web. Additionally, L^ATEX2_e's clear package and class organization, as well as its ease of installation, should reduce SEP's TEX maintenance.

We had to translate the SEP-specific macros from L^ATEX to L^ATEX2_e dialect. In our translation, we aimed at two contradictory goals: to ease the portability of SEP documents and to be fully backward compatible.

To ease the portability of SEP documents, we developed a minimal set of SEP macros. SEP's minimal macro set contains only a third (26) of the traditional SEP macro family (78). This reduced macro set mostly deals with the inclusion of Postscript figures (activeplot), the inclusion of source code files (gprogblock), with author information (author, email, keywords), and SEP style definitions. All other commands are standard L^ATEX2_e commands. We hope that the minimal macro set will enable us to share our L^ATEX2_e macros easily with other organizations that have similar needs (SEG, TRIP at Rice University, and CWP at Colorado School of Mines.)

We recommend this minimal set for future SEP documents. To restrict the processing of his document to the minimal set, an author needs to define LATOPTS = option=minimal in his document's makefile. However, the current default ensures backward compatibility since it uses the superset of traditional SEP macros. This backward compatibility will, we hope, simplify the transition to the new document system.

Why do we use L^ATEX rather than any other text or word processing system such as Microsoft Word? We have used L^ATEX in the past and all students at SEP can write L^ATEX documents. We also have a legacy of L^ATEX documents. L^ATEX still seems to be the method of choice for mathematical typesetting, but we have not seriously tested some attractive-sounding alternatives, such as framemaker. Additionally, since L^ATEX2_e is freely distributed, we can include it on SEP's interactive CD-ROMs.